officials. Such rumours turned out to be seriously exaggerated, but the episode
speaks to the fear of what the peace was likely to bring.^3
Anxieties about robberies and other violence may have been better founded
after 1712. The generally low levels of prosecutions for crimes against property
in the City that had characterized the war years in the first decade of the eight-
eenth century rose sharply at the peace. Within a year so many accused offend-
ers were being arrested in Middlesex that the magistrates were contemplating
the need to build ‘a strong house for convicts’ at Tothill Bridewell.^4 In the
immediate post-war years between 1713 and 1720 total prosecutions for
property offences did not reach the heights of the last years of the 1690 s, but that
was because an unusually large number of women had been prosecuted in the
late seventeenth century. The number of men indicted in the early years of
George I’s reign exceeded that of the 1690 s. And when one looks more closely at
the offences charged against them, it becomes clear why there might have been
something of a panic in those post-war years, and why the perception formed
that (as Charles Hitchen said) London had become a ‘Den of Thieves and
Robbers’.^5 The simple number of indictments does not sufficiently reveal the
underlying character of prosecuted crime in London after 1713 —particularly
the high level of violent offences. A clearer indicator of that is the proportion of
capital offences among the property crimes charged at the Old Bailey. In both
the 1690 s and in the war years in Anne’s reign 40 per cent of the men indicted
for property offences faced non-clergyable (that is, in effect, capital) charges,
and 60 per cent clergyable. In the eight years after 1712 , however, those pro-
portions were reversed. Between 1713 and 1720 six out of ten men brought to
trial for crimes against property were charged with an offence for which they
could have been executed on conviction.^6
The fact that the most common of the capital offences committed by men in
these post-war years and in both the City and Middlesex were robbery and burg-
lary helps to explain why there was such intense concern in George I’s reign about
the way violence had ‘risen to so great a heith [sic]’, as one man said in 1720 ,
‘that it is a matter of astonishment as well as grief to the inhabitants [ofLondon]’.^7
Street robbery was thought to be particularly common. Evidence collected
by Jeremy Pocklington for the whole metropolis north of the river—for
Middlesex as well as the City—reveals a strong rise in prosecutions for highway
Crime and the Hanoverian succession
(^3) See Daniel Statt, ‘The Case of the Mohocks: Rake Violence in Augustan London’, Social History, 20
( 1995 ), 179 – 99 ; and Neil Guthrie, ‘ “No Truth or very little in the whole Story”? A Reassessment of the
Mohock Scare of 1712 ’, Eighteenth-Century Life, new ser. 20 / 2 (May 1996 ), 33 – 56 , who both discuss the evi-
dence thoroughly. As one example of the anxiety that can be found expressed in a variety of sources,
William Nicolson, the Bishop of Carlisle, reported on his visit to London in March of 1712 his sister
‘in great fear of the Mohocks’ (Clyve Jones and Geoffrey Holmes (eds.), The London Diaries of William
Nicolson, 1702 – 1718 (Oxford, 1985 ), 595 ).
(^4) LMA: MJ/SP/October 1714.
(^5) Charles Hitchin, A True Discovery of the Conduct of Receivers and Thief-Takers in and about the City of London
( 1718 ), 7.
(^6) Based on the Sample, for which see above, p. ix. (^7) SP 35 / 22 / 58.